"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite system is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth Boulding "Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." - Mayer Anshelm Rothschild In any normal social system you care to examine, the gap between the poorest employee and the richest is about a factor of 20. This includes the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, collegiate academia and the military. It's stable. It's what the human race points to. If the guy sweeping the floors makes $10k a year, the president should make about $200k a year. Not banking. I've held the belief since I was 14 that the abolition of the stock market would stabilize the fuck out of the world. Then I learned about the bond market and I realized it was hopeless.
Do you make this assertion with evidence or without evidence? Not much point looking up a 1040 for Augustus when a third of the populace received no salary. The first hit for "salary of pope" claims an income of $200,000,000 per year for Benedict XVI. The second hit says the amount is $0. Hard to find a 1:20 ratio here either. How do you figure out the minimum? An adjunct professor in Vermont earned $24,000 one year. The median salary of an English language instructor was $34,712 in 2005.In any normal social system you care to examine, the gap between the poorest employee and the richest is about a factor of 20.
This includes the Roman Empire,
Wikipedia says "At the time of Augustus, as many as 35 percent of the people in Italy were slaves..."the Catholic Church,
This is hard to evaluate. The first hit I found searching for "salaries in the catholic church" gives an average minister pay of about $35,000. Presumably the minimum would be significantly lower, especially if you count remote parish priests working for next to nothing.collegiate academia
This is also hard to judge, but might be close to 1:20 if you exclude athletics and use the median instead of minimum on the low side. Here's a scandal about a professor making $700,096 a year. Another article shows Yale's president making over a million (a fairer comparison than the far better-paid football coach, given your mention of the U.S. president). A Harvard professor makes $1.19 million.and the military.
Here the ratio is closer to 1:10, but seems a stretch to describe it as a "normal social system" when it is more like a single organization.
Not my assertion. Paul Gilding's. Start on Page 234. He's quoting Herman daly. Thanks for going the extra mile to be accusatory about it.Do you make this assertion with evidence or without evidence?
Noted. Does Paul Gilding provide evidence for his claims? Amazon shows one in the first line: "The earth is full." To wit, "our human society and economy is now so large we have passed the limits of our planet's capacity to support us..." and there is "no room left" for the billions of desperate people in appalling poverty. And yet, the UN tells us that "The target of reducing extreme poverty rates by half was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline." I acknowledge my frustration with the thoughtful web. I have as yet been unsuccessful in sparking any debate based on facts rather than slogans. I thought this video a good place to start. I am willing to read a book, but need to be able to get past the first page, or even the title, without slapping my forehead. Sorry for being annoying.Not my assertion.
Thanks for going the extra mile to be accusatory about it.